


with a heart so heavy and beating like a drum

by adventurepants



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-20
Updated: 2015-03-20
Packaged: 2018-03-18 19:36:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3581403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adventurepants/pseuds/adventurepants
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cole says there are rings inside of people like there are inside of trees, and the hurt you feel when you're young doesn't go away- it's still there inside your grown up body.  Sometimes he doesn't make much sense, but sometimes he makes a great deal of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	with a heart so heavy and beating like a drum

**Author's Note:**

> For Grace, who suggested I write about my Inquisitor and fear. Thanks for texting me about this game every day.

In the Circle, she had not feared death. 

She feared plenty, at first. She had been barely six, crying into her mother's skirt, begging for her not to let them take her, but her mother had only told her to be a good girl, do as they say. Her father stood still as a stone and let the templars pry her tiny fingers from where they clutched fistfuls of her mother's clothing. She thinks she remembers one of her sisters crying, but it's been so long that she doesn't know which one.

When the children of the Circle are young, they're told that being made Tranquil is not something to fear. It is a kindness, it is protection for those who need it. The Tranquil are never sad, never frightened. So she doesn't understand why, when she lights her hands at night to make the dark less scary, the templars shout at her that they'll make her Tranquil if she doesn't stop using magic without supervision. 

“Will I be Tranquil?” she asks Lydia, the Senior Enchanter. It doesn't sound so bad. She wouldn't mind never feeling sad or frightened. She misses her mother and father and her sisters and even her brother, and sometimes it makes her very sad. And even when she is good, some of the templars still look so stern that she's afraid they might hit her if she so much as coughs out of turn.

“Dear child, no,” Lydia says, and something in her voice makes Eilif think Tranquility is not a good thing after all. “Your magic is strong and so are you. You will be one of our best.”

Lydia is gentle and motherly, and all the children in the Circle love her. In time, it's Lydia she asks for when she is sick, or has a bad dream, and her mother's touch is a fading memory.

Her childhood passes by quietly, uniformly. Her family stops writing, little by little, and she finds that it's become difficult to remember them at all. The name Trevelyan, which had meant a great deal when she was very small, means almost nothing here. The Trevelyans are an old family, wealthy, respected, but Eilif is a Circle Mage first, a Trevelyan distantly second. Lydia would tell her that this is her family now, but the older she gets the more she begins to feel like she is not part of a family at all. That scares her a bit, the idea of belonging to nothing, but she remembers that she belongs here. Her place is in the Circle, for better or worse.

She's called for her Harrowing when she's 18, and she is only as nervous as she would be for any other test. The other apprentices whisper rumors that if you take too long the templars will kill you, but Lydia promises her that it's not true. In all her time at the Ostwick Circle, she says, no one called for their Harrowing has failed. 

“I've heard that it's stricter in Ferelden,” she tells Eilif. “But you have nothing to worry about here. I would never let them hurt you.”

Afterwards, even though it's over, even though she's fine, she can't stop thinking about the Fade and how awful it would be to be trapped there, without a body to go back to. The anxiety eats at her for weeks, but there are children that she must help teach now, children who are small and scared and missing home like she had been, so she swallows it down and puts on a smile for them and tells them what a good job they're doing, what good mages they will be.

*

At the Conclave, of course, everything changes in an instant. Whatever she had feared, growing up in the Circle, it was nothing compared to this. Now, the possibility of death is real every day, and Lydia is not here to tell her kind lies that everything will be all right. No one here lies merely for the sake of kindness. Even Josephine, who is so warm and beautiful and smart that it twists Eilif's insides up in what she thinks must be desire, says she prefers to find a way to use the truth in a manner that benefits their cause. But Eilif is a grown woman, now. She thinks she would rather hear the truth, even as bluntly as Cassandra always gives it.

She is not sure she and Cassandra will be friends, at first. It doesn't help that Cassandra spends the first hours of their relationship believing that Eilif had killed the Divine. But in time, all the hardness is gone from Cassandra's eyes when she looks at Eilif, and she admits, “You are more than I could have hoped for.”

Eilif has never witnessed such unwavering bravery as she does in Cassandra, and she tries very hard to follow her example. But they share a tent when they're traveling, and at night Eilif can't stop the nightmares from coming.

Sometimes it's Haven, and no one makes it out. The whole place burns and Corypheus is laughing. Sometimes she dreams of stumbling through the snow afterwards, but she doesn't find her friends, and they don't find her, and after a while she is so tired and so cold and everything is growing darker. Sometimes she dreams of the explosion at the Conclave, that they execute her because she can't prove it wasn't her fault. Sometimes, she dreams of the future, and it's worse even than the nightmare she traveled through with Dorian.

Usually she wakes quietly, her eyes snap open and she can hear Cassandra breathing in the dark, and in a few moments her own breathing slows and she knows that her dream was not real. Once, she wakes with a gasp, and hears Cassandra stirring.

“Were you dreaming?” she asks.

“Yes,” Eilif whispers.

She is frozen in her embarrassment until Cassandra says, “It's all right. You are safe.”

*

A letter comes for her, and she takes one look at the crest stamped into the seal and takes it directly to Josephine, holding it out as if it might do her some bodily harm. “It's from my family,” she says. “I can't read it.”

Josephine takes the letter from her, turns it over in her hands carefully. “Perhaps... they only wish for a reconciliation.”

“A reconciliation?” Eilif repeats. “They sent me away because they had to. They stopped writing to me because... because the Circle made it so that I didn't belong to them anymore, and maybe it was too difficult to pretend that I did.” She shakes her head. “There is nothing to reconcile. There is nothing... there is nothing in this letter for me.”

Josephine steps out from behind her desk. She is not often given to displays of affection in her professional spaces, where anyone could walk in at any time, but she reaches for Eilif's hand, brings it to her lips and kisses it. “You do not have to read it,” she says. “But if you would like to... I am here.”

Eilif leans in, kisses Josephine at the corner of her mouth, and takes the letter back.

When she opens it, a long-forgotten ache spreads in her chest. It's been almost twenty years since she's seen it but the handwriting is somehow still familiar. “It's from Anna,” she says. “My oldest sister,” she adds after a moment, though it's unnecessary. She knows they'd looked into her background in the earliest days of the Inquisition, that they know the names of her parents and siblings, the state of their finances, their relationship to the Chantry.

“What does she say?” Josephine asks.

“She says that... she says that they were relieved to hear I'm alive. That they pray for me and that... they've been warned not to travel outside of the Free Marches for now, but when this is all over, she would like to see me. They all would like to see me.”

Josephine smiles. “That's wonderful. Isn't it?”

Eilif folds the letter back up. “I haven't seen them since I was six. We're strangers to each other now. What if they don't like me?” It feels like a childish worry, like something that should be beneath her, but Cole says there are rings inside of people like there are inside of trees, and the hurt you feel when you're young doesn't go away- it's still there inside your grown up body. Sometimes he doesn't make much sense, but sometimes he makes a great deal of it.

“If they don't like you, then they're obviously all very stupid,” Josephine says, and it's so unlike her to give in to unnecessary rudeness that Eilif laughs, much of her tension leaving her with the sound. She will have a family, she knows, whether it's the one she was born into or not.

*

She gets too close to a dragon in the Hinterlands and it slices a claw down her side, and there's a great deal of shouting as she falls heavily to the ground. Dorian is the first to reach her side, and he is not a healer but he knows a few basic things. “If you were just dead,” he says, his hand covered in her blood and a strange warmth spreading from his fingers into her wound, “I could raise you right back up. Simple as that. But you have to go and make it complicated, don't you?”

She means to say she's sorry, but when she opens her mouth it's only a wordless cry that escapes her.

“There, there,” he says. “It's all right. I'd rather a slightly damaged Eilif than an undead herald, any day.” He keeps one hand spread over her wound and the other brushes hair out of her eyes, his thumb sweeping lightly over her forehead. “I know it hurts, I'm sorry. I won't let you die, darling. For one, Josephine would be devastated, which I believe would lead to Leliana having me killed in my sleep, and we can't have that.”

She nods, squeezes her eyes shut and hears the terrifying shriek of the dragon as it dies, and when she opens them Cassandra is standing over her. “Stupid girl,” she says, full of relief and fondness, and it's such a great comfort that Eilif finds herself smiling. 

Dorian carries her partway back to camp, and when he starts complaining, Cassandra takes her from him, once it's determined that she absolutely can't hold herself upright or even dream about getting on a horse. Cassandra holds her as if she weighs nothing, and when she makes a small noise of discomfort, Cassandra stops momentarily. “We are almost there,” she says. “Will you be all right?”

“Yes,” Eilif says. “I'm sorry. I'm fine.”

*

Back at Skyhold, one of their healers makes quick work of Eilif's wound and then frowns at the scar it leaves. “Perhaps if you'd been tended to by a proper healer immediately...” she says, eyes narrowing at Dorian who had helped her there. 

“I shall take that as my cue to go,” he says, backing away. “And don't listen to her. You look fine.” He pauses, takes a step forward again, and bends to place a kiss on the top of her head. “Forgive me for leaving you so horribly disfigured.”

Later, in her quarters, Josephine gingerly traces her fingers down the jagged line.

“It doesn't look so bad, does it?” Eilif asks.

“Oh,” Josephine says, frustrated, impatient. “I do not care about the scar. I would not care if you had a hundred. I care about the wound that came before it.”

“I was never in danger of dying, Josephine. Please don't worry, I'm all right. I'm here.”

Josephine shakes her head. “You are in danger of dying more often than you're not. And I don't know what I would do if...” she trails off and can't finish her sentence. Josephine has words for everything but is speechless at the idea of losing Eilif, who finds that she is not so much afraid of death as she is afraid of leaving Josephine behind, of losing the life that they could have together.

“I'm here,” she says again, and when she touches Josephine it is with such reverence, such love, that she hardly needs to say it, but does anyway. “I love you. I will do everything I can to stay alive.”

“I love you,” Josephine tells her, in the common tongue, in Antivan, Orlesian, every language she knows. “I love you. Please, please, be careful.”

*

She visits Leliana in the rookery and presses a sealed letter into her hands. “If I should die,” she says, “please give this to Josephine.”

Leliana knows everything, it is her job to know everything, and still Eilif knows Leliana will not read the letter, knows it in the way Leliana looks at her, eyes softer and kinder than most people have the privilege of seeing. “Whatever is in this letter,” she says. “She knows.”

Eilif nods. “I know. But if it happens, I won't... it's likely to be quick, and far from here, and if I don't get to say goodbye... I want my last words to be to her.”

Leliana nods. “Of course.”

_Know that I loved you,_ she had written. _Know that I love you still, that I am at home with the Maker and that I wait for you, watch over you, that I am in every sunrise and sunset and that you made me happier than I had ever dreamed of being. That the things I wish for most in the world are your safety and happiness, even if that happiness can no longer be with me._

She doesn't notice that she's trembling until the shaking of her hands is stilled by Leliana's holding them. Before she can stop it she is crying, shoulders heaving, and Leliana's arms are around her.

“Shh, it's all right,” Leliana says. “It's all right to be afraid, I won't tell anyone.”

Eilif nods and can't quite speak. She knows the end of all this is coming. A month from now, either Corypheus will be dead or she will. Perhaps both. “I don't want to let anyone down,” she says finally. “I don't want him to be able to hurt anyone else, but I...” She holds out her left hand. “This didn't change me. I'm still just a person, just a mage. No more powerful than I was. What if I can't win?”

“Sweet girl,” Leliana says. “You would never let us down. You couldn't. Eilif, you are loved. Not only by Josephine. Let that make you strong.”

*

She remembers this, later, when the orb is in her hand and Corypheus is shouting and the rest of the world is falling quickly away. She is loved, she is loved. She is stronger than him.


End file.
